The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Great site with a really nice app. Most of the images are in the US, but growing number around the UK and would be great to get students to add to them.
WhatWasThere – Put history in its place!
Allows anyone to upload historical photo and see photos from others in geolocation context.
Predicting Terrorism From Big Data Challenges U.S. Intelligence
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: US Intelligence Cannot Process Big Data”
From Orwell to Gladwell and Back
The technology of power is moving from the past’s emphasis on privacy and concealment toward more contemporary techniques of diversion, bias, misconception, and willful stupidity. The crude methods that George Orwell summed up in his image of the incinerator-chute “memory hole” are growing into more sophisticated devices for providing the public with misleading frameworks for mentally organizing (or rationalizations for simply ignoring) the overload of available facts, thus making it harder to remember or understand politically inconvenient knowledge.
We see some of the old-fashioned memory-hole techniques at work currently with Wikipedia. Read full article.
5 stars
Compelling, Insightful, Useful – Glosses Over Some Fundamentals
This book excels at offering a compelling overview of the severe deficiencies in US national security strategy, policy, and operations – it is one of the strongest indictments I have seen of our total inability to wage peace instead of war. Among the many high points covered by the author and included in my extensive notes:
01 USA has no Grand Strategy and no process for creating and executing a Grand Strategy. Deep in the book the author observes that not only is Grand Strategy the only means of fully employing all sources of national power, but it is also how one anticipates and avoids unintended consequences.
02 The elements of the US Government (USG) nominally responsible for waging peace – the Departments of State and Commerce, the US Agency of International Development (USAID), the US Information Agency (abolished in 1999) are under-trained, unsynchronized entities unable to deter conflict or build a lasting peace.
Richard Martin: Assange Is Not Kidding
It turns out Assange wasn't kidding. He is delivering tranches of 1000 or so hacked emails a day from major political organizations and politicians. Some of the emails are some of the missing 30,000 emails which Hillary Clinton had scrubbed off her illegal home servers.
